Toshi Ichiyanagi and then published a “great Anthology” (959; see also Young and Mac Low 1963). Young was on his way to becoming a leading figure in modern music.
Since then, however, Cardew continued, Young wrote almost nothing: “The Henry Flynt piece and a Death Chant on the death of a friend’s child are the only compositions known to me. Instead of composing he took to improvising long concerts with various associates,” namely his wife, Marian Zazeela; Tony Conrad; and “a Welsh musician who was responsible for introducing the tape [of a performance by Young] into this country,” John Cale (960). With amplified instruments and voice, these musicians produced “variations of timbre and texture . . . by tuning and intensity of the various partials of a single fundamental tone” (960). And if for some these sounds were the most horrible that one could imagine, they moved us (or “should” move us, he added) more than “any merely artistic or intelligent attempt to shake the foundations of our complacent normality” (960).
LILLIPUTIAN
Roger Smalley’s response to Cardew’s convergent rereading of the aesthetics of Young and Stockhausen was not long in coming: his letter to the editor appeared in the Musical Times at the beginning of 1967 (1967a). Like Cardew, Smalley was a well-known figure in the British music establishment. He was one of the pianists most active in performing contemporary music, particularly that of Stockhausen, with whom he had studied composition two years earlier.9 In his letter, Smalley addressed not so much the influence of X for Henry Flynt on Piano Piece IX as Cardew’s reading of it. Unlike Young, Smalley asserted, Stockhausen made music; one need only listen to what followed the 227 repetitions of the same chord in the German composer’s piece. But in Young’s piece, “nothing else happens.” Stockhausen, Smalley added, “is certainly a giant—probably the tallest; La Monte Young is, by comparison, a Lilliputian.” The former’s conceptions “are expressed in a musical language of sovereign assurance and power.” For their part, Young’s later compositions “have no interest whatsoever as far as musical construction, development or form are concerned,” and in fact some of his works could not even “be expressed in musical notation”; indeed, Smalley added, “I don’t even see how they can be performed.” As for Cardew’s verdict with regard to “our complacent normality” and his justification of the chaos in Young’s work, Smalley retorted that “a composer may be obsessive but is never chaotic, and . . . his ideas may come from life but never just consist of life . . . they must be expressed in a musical syntax.” In any event, he concluded, hearing Young’s work “either slightly annoys or thoroughly bores me.”
It appears that Young’s recent works interested no other British critics besides his habitual champion. For Cardew in 1966, Young’s body of work seemed to end in 1962, with X for Henry Flynt and Death Chant (1960). Mentions of Young in Cardew’s subsequent articles again referred to his pre-1962 compositions rather than his work with his “various associates” (Cardew 1967; 1968).
IMPROVISATIONS
The connection between Cardew and Young did not, however, disappear; instead, it operated at a different level. Some of the characteristics that Cardew had formerly attributed to Young’s music can, in fact, be noted in Cardew’s descriptions of his own works in the late 1960s.
In 1966, Cardew joined a group whose music was described as “continuous improvisation which admits all sounds” (Parsons 1968, 430). The group was AMM, with Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, and Eddie Prévost.10 Like Young’s group, as described by Cardew (1966, 960), AMM used amplification to transform sounds and produce new ones (Parsons 1968, 430). In spring 1968 Cardew’s own group—the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble—performed Young’s music (Death Chant) along with that of another American composer, Terry Riley (In C, 1964).11 A year later he founded his own improvisation group, the Scratch Orchestra, and published the ensemble’s “Constitution” (Cardew 1969). There he again emphasized his interest in Young’s music as well as Riley’s. Both figure prominently in the list of works played by the ensemble (Cardew 1969, 619). Once again, the aesthetics of these composers, as Cardew conveyed them, seemed intimately linked to his own: for example, the Scratch Orchestra’s music, like Young’s, was concert music in which each of the members was encouraged to contribute accompaniments “performable continuously for indefinite periods” (617). The notation was free, and its place was secondary, while improvisation played a decisive role (619). One important element, however, seemed to distinguish the Scratch Orchestra from Young’s group: the former indulged in the performance of “popular classics”—Beethoven, Mozart, and even John Cage—cut up or freely rearranged, particularly through improvisation (617–18).12
When he published his “Constitution” in 1969, Cardew had been teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, Morley College of Art, and Maidstone College of Art for several months. The composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton were students of his whom he invited to join the Scratch Orchestra. Many others joined as well: Gavin Bryars, Michael Chant, Brian Dennis, Brian Eno, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Nyman, Jill and Tom Phillips, Hugh Schrapnel, Dave Smith, John Tilbury, and John White figure among the students or collaborators of Cardew who swelled the orchestra’s ranks.13 Many of these would themselves become teachers: Bryars and Parsons at Portsmouth; Nyman at Trent Polytechnic, Maidstone, and Goldsmith’s College; Tilbury at South West Essex Technical College, Kingston, Portsmouth, and Falmouth; White at Leicester Polytechnic. Most of them created their own groups in Cardew’s footsteps: White, Hobbs, and Schrapnel were together again in Promenade Theatre Orchestra; Bryars, Eno, and Nyman in Portsmouth Sinfonia.14
It was the end of the 1960s and beginning of the ’70s. Cardew’s work of musical militancy was about to take a political turn, in the literal sense, when he turned his back on the avant--garde to focus on the creation of music to serve the Marxist cause.15 At that time any aesthetic bonds he had managed to forge between his work and Stockhausen’s broke. In 1974 Cardew gave a talk that was broadcast on BBC radio and published in its magazine, the Listener; he then republished it in a collection of his essays (1974). The lecture (as well as the book) was titled “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism” and denounced the composer’s participation in imperialism through his cosmic composition Refrain (1959), which Cardew saw as disconnected from the painful contradictions of the real world. The aesthetic union of Cardew and Stockhausen became even more difficult when a former student of Cardew’s who was active at the Listener published a book titled Experimental Music (Nyman 1974). In it Nyman solidified the contrast between the hypercontrol characterizing Stockhausen’s music and the freedom that marked that of Cardew, Cage, and the “experimentalists.” The book was a resounding success, and the notion of a link between the two composers faded into oblivion.16
AFTER CARDEW
In the wake of Cardew, many others stepped up to fortify the standing of Young or that of their former teacher in the landscape of contemporary music. Howard Skempton defended his teacher as well as Young against Smalley’s criticisms in 1967;17 in 1968 in the Musical Times, Jill Phillips described a gathering of “extraordinarily talented and devoted” musicians as well as the “good moments” in the performance of Death Chant, a “minimalist” work by the American composer (Phillips 1968a), while students from Morley College and Maidstone College of Art presented Young’s Trio for Strings in May 1969 at the Round House (Musical Times 110, no. 1515 [May 1969]: 552).18 One of the most fervent defenders of the aesthetic that Cardew promoted was one of his first students, Michael Parsons. Parsons focused his attention on a composer whom Cardew had closely associated with Young: Terry Riley. In May 1968, Parsons reviewed a concert of works by Young and Riley performed by the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In this review, he established a connection between Riley’s In C (1964) and Cageian chance by appealing to the audience to link them (Parsons 1968). For In C, Riley had specified a series of musical cells transcribed in traditional notation; he also provided a long series of instructions
